An employee advised his co-worker that he was going on supper break by saying a French equivalent of “I’m going for supper.” Can you guess how he said it?

The employee used a first-person present tense conjugation of s’en aller(to go), followed by the verb souper(to eat supper, to have supper). In other words, to say to go for supper, he used the expression s’en aller souper.

One way s’en aller conjugates is as je m’en vais, giving us je m’en vais souper — but that’s not what he said. Another way it conjugates is as je m’en vas, where vas rhymes with pas. The conjugation je m’en vas is a colloquial form and contracts in spoken language to j’m’en vas, giving us j’m’en vas souper. This still isn’t quite what the employee said, though.

Here, finally, is what he said:

M’en vas souper.
I’m going for supper.

M’en vas is a reduction of the conjugation je m’en vas, where the pronoun je is no longer present.

I grabbed a handful of usages that have appeared on OffQc since post #1000 and put them in a cloud. Can you explain to yourself how each one might be used? You can click on the image for a larger version.

We’ve seen before on OffQc that the three meals of the day in Québec are called:

le déjeuner, breakfast

le dîner, lunch

le souper, supper

On the radio, though, here’s what the host said to us listeners:

C’est l’heure du lunch qui s’en vient bientôt.
Lunchtime’s coming up.

That’s lunch’s second name in Québec: le lunch.

A reader of OffQc liked this Québecois usage: la boîte à lunch, which she found in this newspaper article online. The article is called Suggestions pour la boîte à lunch, and contains suggestions of lunches kids can take to school. You can say un sac à lunch if it’s a bag.

There’s another meal that could be added to this list: le brunch. It’s a meal that occurs between breakfast + lunch.

In advertising especially, you might notice the typically Québécois terms are sometimes not used. Here’s what’s on the back cover of an Ikea catalogue that showed up in my mailbox:

Rather than calling breakfast in bed déjeuner au lit like they did in this TVA article, the Ikea magazine uses petit-déjeuner au lit.

Here’s how the TVA article used déjeuner au lit:

Vous cherchez à gâter maman à l’occasion de la fête des mères? Pourquoi ne pas lui préparer un décadent déjeuner au lit pour débuter sa journée en beauté?
Want to spoil Mother on Mother’s Day? Why not make her a decadent breakfast in bed so she can get her day off to a great start?

How do you say things like to have breakfast, to have supper, etc.? You can use the verb forms of the words (dîner, souper…). In #451, we saw:

Vous avez pas encore soupé.
You haven’t had supper yet.

Ça vous dérange pas qu’ils soupent avec nous?
Is it okay if they stay for supper? have supper with us?

You can also say things like aller souper, aller dîner, aller bruncher, etc. In #991, we saw:

26. j’ai un pied-à-terre en campagne
I’ve got a pied-à-terre in the country

Pied-à-terre is pronounced pié-à-terre or pié-t’à-terre; it’s a secondary residence for occasional use. In the sense of “in the countryside,” you’ll come across the expressions à la campagne and en campagne, but some resources (like the BDL here) say that en campagne should only refer to being in a publicity campaign, electoral campaign, etc., and à la campagne to being in the countryside. The author of this example sentence didn’t follow this convention.

This time, let’s do the same with Swiss French. A word or expression used in Swiss French is called a helvétisme.

I’ve referred to the Usito dictionary again. In it, there’s a list of helvétismes prepared by André Thibault. I’ve pulled 7 words from the list of helvétismes that also happen to be used in Québécois French.

Just like the shared Belgian-Québécois words and expressions, these shared Swiss-Québécois words may be heard in other French-speaking areas as well, not just in Switzerland and Québec.

mitaines

1. une mitaine
a mitten (the fingers aren’t separated in a mitten like they are in a glove)

Je le fais pour rester jeune et continuer à jouer avec mes enfants!
I do it to stay young and keep playing with my kids!

Je le fais pour pouvoir encore le faire quand j’aurai 85 ans!
I do it so I’ll still be able to do it when I’m 85 years old!

In the first sign, we’ve got the word souper. Do you remember what the three meals of the day are called in Québec?

le déjeuner, breakfastle dîner, lunchle souper, supper

For some (but not all) francophones elsewhere in the world, the three meals are called le petit déjeuner, le déjeuner, le dîner instead. This is the case for Parisians. The Québécois usages aren’t limited to Québec. They’re also used in Belgium and Switzerland.

The Québécois usage of déjeuner for breakfast instead of lunch makes sense. Le jeûne is a period of fasting (not eating). On jeûne through the night, and on déjeune in the morning at the déjeuner. The déjeuner breaks the jeûne.

English and Spanish also use the equivalent of déjeuner: “breakfast” breaks the fast, and desayuno breaks the ayuno.

In addition to le dîner, lunch is also called le lunch in Québec. Une boîte à lunch is a lunchbox. Sur mon heure de lunch means “on my lunch break,” like at work.